New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
At 200, Mitchell finally celebrated
NEW HAVEN — Famous in his day for his writing and lecturing on his European travels, Donald Grant Mitchell thought of himself much more as an urban farmer and landscape architect, a lover of beauty in all its forms.
But while the Westville branch of the New Haven Free Public Library is named for him, Mitchell’s name is barely known by those who enjoy East Rock and Edgewood parks, which he designed.
Mitchell would have turned 200 on April 12, and several organizations in New Haven are not about to let his bicentennial go unnoticed.
“I have been fascinated with Donald Grant Mitchell since I first found out about him back in the mid-eighties because of his perception of surrounding ourselves with beauty, be it in our homes, in our gardens, in whatever surroundings we are in,” said Barbara Lamb, who first researched Mitchell as an undergraduate at the University of New Haven and wrote an article published by the New Haven Museum.
Lamb, former director of arts and cultural affairs for New Haven, has taken on the task of helping promote Mitchell’s 200th birthday. She’s coordinating other groups, such as the New Haven Museum, the Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the New Haven Preservation Trust and others, who already had Mitchell’s birthday in mind.
A grant from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven helped pay for the website, donaldgrantmitchell.com, a logo created by Design Monsters and social media.
A birthday party last week at the Mitchell library brought everyone together.
Born in Norwich, Mitchell graduated as valedictorian from Yale College in 1841 at just 19 years old, after contributing more than 160 pages of his writings to the Yale Literary Magazine. After a life of ease at his mother’s ancestral home in Salem, and following his parents’ deaths, Mitchell’s guardian sent him off to the American consulate in Liverpool, England, from where he toured the British Isles, writing under the pseudonym Ik Marvel.
In 1855, he bought the farm he called Edgewood on the west side of Forest Road. His rough stone, brick and timbered house and three other buildings he owned still stand, according to Lamb. “He never intended the house to be a grand showcase,” she said. “It was his homestead. He thought of it as a family home and none of those houses on Forest Road were there at the time.”
He did open the house to the public two days a week, however, Lamb said. Now it is divided into apartments.
Westville was far less urban in the late 19th century. “He could stand on his front porch and he could see steamboats coming into the harbor from there. He could see the lighthouse from there.”
His biographer, Waldo Dunn, wrote in 1922, “His interests were many. He was author, editor, practical farmer, landscape gardener, art critic; and in all these activities he attained distinction. He is known chiefly perhaps as a man of letters; yet he always hesitated to call himself a professional author, and stoutly maintained that his contributions to the practical and aesthetic phases of rural life was his finest achievement.”
Over the years, Mitchell added to the farm, which eventually totaled 360 acres, and had a hand in designing a number of parks, including Bayview and Fort Hale, as well as Edgewood and East Rock. He also designed gardens and parks in other cities, according to the official website.
He also was a master cartographer, and Lamb said overlaying his maps with Google maps shows his skill. “I was fascinated by this whole idea of the farm being in what we now think of as this suburbanurban area that’s all built up,” Lamb said.
“He clearly describes his first impression of going through Westville, the village of Westville,” she said. “The way he describes it just makes you feel like you’re there.”
While Mitchell was well known in his day as a writer, Lamb said, “the other thing that attracted him to me was … he was withdrawn. He was unassuming. He never sought to call attention to himself. He was not just a lover of nature and the environment, but he was a lover of beauty and he thought it took very little to make your environment beautiful, whether it was flowers or trees.”
Mitchell’s book “My Farm of Edgewood” was a best-seller and is available at the Mitchell library and the Ives Memorial Library’s local history room.
Among the events planned are a planned online talk at 6 p.m. May 5 by Jay Gitlin, a senior lecturer at Yale University on U.S. and Canadian history, sponsored by the New Haven Museum, which has a collection of Mitchell’s papers, maps and reports on park development, as well as photos.
Gitlin’s talk will be called “The Suburb Within: Donald Grant Mitchell, Edgewood and the Greening of New Haven.” Gitlin suggested that Mitchell might be thought of as New Haven’s Henry David Thoreau, because both needed to be near their publishers.
“Mitchell’s a farm boy trying to make his peace with having a profession that requires him to live in contact with the city,” Gitlin said. “And so he’s trying to come up with his own compromise. And he does it by buying this incredible farm in the west side of New Haven. … He wants to, as he says himself, he wants to hear the corn grind. He wants to go fishing. But he wants to do so within walking distance of the train that takes him to New York.”
Gitlin said Mitchell also was one of the best-selling authors of the mid-19th century, “and yet, he’s not well known.”
A number of events already have been planned:
At noon May 7, Stephanie FitzGerald of the Friends of Edgewood will lead a walking tour of the park, showing Mitchell’s contributions. The Westville Village Renaissance Alliance will show Mitchell’s maps and photos and a talk by Lamb at Coogan Pavilion in Edgewood Park during ArtWalk the same day.
The Friends of East Rock Park will celebrate Mitchell from 1 to 3 p.m. June 11 with a talk by Channing Harris about the features designed by Mitchell. A walk from the Trowbridge Environmental Center will follow.
There is a display of photographs, a book of 1860s landscape photography by Mitchell and other items at the Beinecke, through May 1. Other events that have yet to be scheduled include a theatrical performance by A Broken Umbrella Theatre about “I. Marvel” and an architectural walking tour of Edgewood farm by the New Haven Preservation Trust.